Australian Business Websites 2026: First Results, from Canberra
Published
This is the first city in our study of Australian business websites. On 26 September 2026 we drew a random sample of 200 websites from the 804 Canberra business websites mapped in OpenStreetMap, and checked each homepage for the platform it runs on, how it handles HTTPS and whether it is set up for phones. Every figure below gives its count and its base, and the CSV files give the 95 per cent interval, definition and date for each one.
Read it as a pilot. OpenStreetMap is mapped by volunteers and leans towards shopfronts, so the sample describes mapped businesses, not every business in Canberra. We did not measure speed or Core Web Vitals, which need Google's Chrome UX Report; that has not been queried yet. The study is planned to cover more Australian cities on this page, each with the same method.
Key findings
- WordPress ran 65 of the 162 Canberra homepages we could read (40.1%). Shopify ran 18 (11.1%), Wix 15 (9.3%) and Squarespace 14 (8.6%).
- Among the 58 retail homepages we could read, Shopify (16) and WordPress (17) were almost level. Outside retail, Shopify ran 2 of 104 measured homepages.
- 150 of the 170 sites whose result we could determine (88.2%) passed our HTTPS test. 17 sites with a valid certificate still served their homepage over plain HTTP instead of redirecting.
- 39 of 162 homepages (24.1%) ask phones to block or limit pinch zoom, which the axe accessibility rule for WCAG success criterion 1.4.4 flags. 161 of 162 set a mobile viewport.
- 12 of the 200 sampled website addresses (6.0%) no longer resolved and 3 were parked domains: the OpenStreetMap entries were out of date.
Results by city
Canberra, ACT
Frame: 1,988 OpenStreetMap features with a website inside the bounding box. Removing 119 outside the ACT boundary, 649 that are not businesses (schools, parks, places of worship and the like), 18 whose website is a profile on another platform and 12 on government or education hosts left 1,190 business features. Counting each website once and dropping the 175 websites used by national or international chains left 804 business websites, and we sampled 200 of them at random.
Retail made up 68 of the 200 sampled websites and food and drink 62, so shopfront businesses dominate the sample. 162 homepages could be read; the other 38 are counted as outcomes, not replaced.
- Websites sampled
- 200 of 804
- Simple random sample of the frame, without replacement
- Homepages measured
- 162 of 200 (81.0%)
- 95% interval 75.0 to 85.8%. Not measured: 12 domains no longer resolve, 11 blocked by a firewall or bot check, 6 no response, 4 robots.txt disallows, 3 parked, 1 HTTP error, 1 TLS error
- WordPress
- 65 of 162 (40.1%)
- 95% interval 32.9 to 47.8%
- Shopify
- 18 of 162 (11.1%)
- 95% interval 7.1 to 16.9%
- Wix
- 15 of 162 (9.3%)
- 95% interval 5.7 to 14.7%
- Squarespace
- 14 of 162 (8.6%)
- 95% interval 5.2 to 14.0%
- Other hosted website builders
- 22 of 162 (13.6%)
- Square Online or Weebly 6, Duda 5, CloudWaitress 3, GoDaddy 3, Webflow 3, TapTouch 1, Hostinger 1
- Custom builds on a framework
- 8 of 162 (4.9%)
- Next.js 3, ASP.NET 2, SvelteKit 1, Gatsby 1, Nuxt 1
- Other e-commerce platforms and CMSs
- 6 of 162 (3.7%)
- BigCommerce 2, Pronto Avenue 1, Craft CMS 1, Joomla 1, Silverstripe 1
- Platform not identified
- 14 of 162 (8.6%)
- No fingerprint matched
- Retail homepages on Shopify
- 16 of 58 (27.6%)
- 95% interval 17.8 to 40.2%. WordPress: 17 of 58 (29.3%)
- HTTPS pass
- 150 of 170 (88.2%)
- 95% interval 82.5 to 92.3%. Valid certificate and plain HTTP redirected (or not served)
- Valid certificate
- 176 of 179 (98.3%)
- Sites whose HTTPS result could be determined
- HSTS header
- 94 of 176 (53.4%)
- Among sites with valid HTTPS
- Mobile viewport set
- 161 of 162 (99.4%)
- Lighthouse 12 viewport rule; negatives confirmed in a browser
- Pinch zoom blocked or limited
- 39 of 162 (24.1%)
- 95% interval 18.1 to 31.2%. user-scalable=no, or maximum-scale below 2
Field data coverage (CrUX)
Field Core Web Vitals come from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX), which needs a Google API key. CrUX has not been queried for Canberra, so this page gives no speed or Core Web Vitals figure for any site. When it runs, this table will show how many sampled sites had field data; CrUX only covers sites with enough Chrome traffic, so that number will be well under 200.
| City | Sites sampled | With CrUX field data | Share with field data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canberra | 200 | Not measured | Not measured |
How the data was collected
Population: websites of businesses mapped in OpenStreetMap inside the city boundary. For Canberra the boundary is the Australian Capital Territory, area 8ACTE in the ABS Australian Statistical Geography Standard, Edition 3 (2021). We took every OpenStreetMap node, way and relation tagged with a website inside it, from the snapshot of 26 September 2026 at 13:55 UTC.
A feature counts as a business when its tags put it in retail, food and drink, health, professional services, trades and crafts, accommodation, leisure and fitness, or a short list of other services. We then removed websites that are a profile on someone else's platform (Facebook, Instagram, booking and directory sites), government and education hosts, and every website used by a feature tagged as a national or international chain. Each website enters the frame once, however many branches it has.
Sample: 200 websites drawn at random without replacement, in a fixed order seeded from the study name and the city, so the same frame always gives the same sample. A site that fails is a finding, not a gap to refill.
Crawl: robots.txt first, then the homepage over HTTPS and over plain HTTP, once each, with redirects followed and no JavaScript run. A site with no answer for a passing reason was tried once more after the first pass. Firewalls and bot checks were never bypassed; they are counted as blocked. The crawl ran from 13:57 to 14:03 UTC on 26 September 2026.
Platform comes from the homepage's HTML and response headers: a generator tag, the platform's own asset host or a header only it sets. Tracking code alone never decides it. These rules have not been checked against a list of known platforms, so treat single-platform shares as estimates within their intervals.
The crawler runs from Pakistan, so we report no response times, and a site that blocks traffic from outside Australia shows as blocked or not responding. Every share is printed with its count and base, and with a Wilson 95 per cent interval in the CSV files. With 200 sites, a share near half has an interval of about seven points either side, so small differences should not be read as real.
- HTTPS pass
- The HTTPS homepage loads with a certificate that validates (Node.js trust store, incomplete chains re-checked in Chromium), and the plain-HTTP homepage redirects to HTTPS or is not served. Base: sites whose result could be determined.
- HSTS
- A Strict-Transport-Security header on the HTTPS homepage response, among sites with valid HTTPS.
- Mobile viewport
- The first meta viewport tag sets width or a non-zero initial-scale, and initial-scale is not below 1 (Lighthouse 12 viewport audit). Pages that failed in the server HTML were loaded in headless Chromium at 390 by 844 before counting as a fail.
- Zoom blocked or limited
- The viewport sets user-scalable=no or 0, or maximum-scale below 2 (axe rule meta-viewport, WCAG 2 success criterion 1.4.4). This records what the page asks for; whether each browser obeys it was not tested.
- Crawl outcomes
- In order of precedence: robots.txt disallows, domain does not resolve, TLS error, no response (timeouts after the retry), blocked (bot check, firewall, HTTP 401, 403 or 429), other HTTP error, not HTML, parked domain, measured.
- Timeouts and limits
- 90 seconds per request, at most 10 redirects, 6 MiB per homepage, 4 sites at a time and one request at a time per site.
- Business locations and website addresses: © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. OpenStreetMap copyright and licence
- The licence for the OpenStreetMap data used here: Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)
- City boundary: Australian Statistical Geography Standard, Edition 3 (2021), Australian Bureau of Statistics, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. ABS copyright and Creative Commons licence
Download the data
Questions about the study
Why does the study only cover Canberra so far?
Canberra was the first city we crawled, as a pilot of the method. More cities are planned for this page, each crawled the same way and listed with its own crawl date.
Can I see which businesses were sampled?
No. We do not name any sampled business, and the published files hold counts only, with no website address, business name or location.
Why is there no speed or Core Web Vitals data?
Field Core Web Vitals come from Google's Chrome UX Report, which needs an API key we have not used yet for this study. We also report no response times, because our crawler runs from Pakistan and its timings would not reflect what Australian visitors see.
How reliable is the platform detection?
It reads the signals each platform leaves in a homepage's HTML and headers, and it has not been tested against a list of known platforms. 14 of the 162 homepages matched no rule and are reported as not identified rather than guessed.
Does a site that blocks zoom fail accessibility law?
This study does not say so. It records that a homepage asks phones to block or limit zoom, which the axe accessibility rule for WCAG success criterion 1.4.4 flags. Some phone browsers ignore that request, and we did not test which.
Saad Ali, Founder / CEO, Digitalis Global
Drafted with AI assistance; researched and reviewed by Saad Ali.